Future-Making Practices in Innovation: A Conviction Narrative Perspective on Foresight

Abstract

Foresight is an effective instrument for creating an anticipatory intelligence for decision-making in innovation management. Innovation actors involved in distal innovation scenarios are challenged by the uncertainty of futures for which rational and systemic decision-making approaches fall short. By contrast, decisions are made under radical uncertainty requiring mental time travel and the construction of conviction narratives that involve known facts, assumptions, inferences, and felt emotional ambivalence from individual actors and groups engaged in foresight. Thus, understanding the processes by which conviction narratives are developed and sustained is important to informing innovation management practices. We apply conviction narrative theory (Tuckett, 2011) to craft a more nuanced account of foresight in innovation management and identify two dimensions (perspectives volume and factor breadth) along which distal future decisions in innovation management may be characterized, which enable us to develop tactics for sustaining innovation-fostering mind states. These tactics seek to strengthen individual competences, enable team cohesion, and establish an institutional frame for foresight in innovation management. Our research sheds light on the microfoundations of foresight, offers insights about future-making practices as organizational phenomenon and extends CNT giving rise to managerial implications to better understand and manage foresight in innovation management.